Gaming & Culture —

Xbox Live Indie Games: no way to make a living

Xbox Live Indie Games get little visibility and rarely sell more than a few …

If you want to publish a console video game, there's no easier route than the Xbox Live Indie Games program. But while it's relatively easy to get your game on the service, it's hard to get it noticed. There's a lot of junk on XBLIG, so much so that a group of developers banded together at the end of last year to promote quality indie titles. There have been success stories—like the recently released FortressCraft, which managed to sell 16,000 units on the day of release—but they're not exactly common.

So with virtually no promotion, and with average earnings of just $3,800 per title, why do developers continue to create games for the platform?

"You're an upstart, brash young punk who wants to make a video game," Jason Wishnov, from Iridium Studios, told Ars. "You have no or minimal industry experience, and you enjoy Mountain Dew. Where else are you going to turn?"

Iridium recently released a well received game called Sequence, a mash-up of a rhythm game and an RPG. Despite receiving positive coverage from places like Edge and Kill Screen magazines, the game only managed to sell around 2,000 copies, which Wishnov describes as "a bit of a flop."

The team did manage to recoup the cost of development, but that was largely due to a very successful Kickstarter campaign, which raised $2,600 on an original goal of just $600.

While Wishnov doesn't have any regrets, he explains that Iridium is looking at PC and mobile as potential options for future projects, and would likely only return to XBLIG for a much smaller scale project. Sequence took around two and a half years to develop.

"It's not financially viable to do a larger-scale project and [not] expect with any certainty to make some money," he told Ars.

Sequence

Cthulhu can't cash in

That's true even for the more successful games on XBLIG. Zeboyd Games is one of the most visible developers on the platform, developing charming retro-style RPGs like Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World. The former managed to sell around 50,000 copies for $1 each, while the latter moved a little more than 16,000 copies at $3 apiece. Those are impressive numbers by XBLIG standards, but that doesn't necessarily make them satisfying for the development team.

"I think our games could sell a lot better than they did with a better platform and more visibility," Zeboyd's Robert Boyd told Ars. "The sales for Cthulhu Saves the World were particularly disappointing—we put a lot of heart and soul into the game over a significantly longer period of development time and yet that extra effort didn't result in a similar increase in revenue."

In order to test this theory, Boyd will take both games, bundled together, to the PC. The enhanced versions will be available on both Steam and Gamersgate later this month, and one of the main motivating factors appears to be money. Zeboyd managed to raise nearly $7,000 to support development of the PC versions of the games, and is hoping that the much larger PC user base will be a more financially viable platform for the studio's games. While Zeboyd's next game will also be released on both XBLIG and PC, it's likely that the studio will leave Microsoft's indie platform for good after this.

"We'd like to make games for a living and make even more impressive games than we've already made—this isn't possible without more money than we've been making so far," Boyd explained.

The somewhat negative perception of the Xbox indie games platform hasn't stopped developers, however. More than 1,400 games have been published on XBLIG since its debut in 2008, and some, like Avatar Paintball, have managed to gross hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. Those success stories are exceedingly rare, and most developers seem to be well aware of that. Instead of monetary gains, many developers are simply using the service as a way to gain experience.

Spooky Squid games is doing just that with its upcoming release They Bleed Pixels, a violent, pixel art-infused action platformer.

"It's a bit of a calculated risk going with XBLIG," Miguel Sternberg, one half of Spooky Squid, told Ars. "We wanted to get some experience coding for a console and liked that XBLIG was a relatively open, hassle-free marketplace like the iPhone app store. One bonus for going with a console is that we can count on everyone playing with a gamepad, something you can't count on when developing for the PC."

They Bleed Pixels

Sternberg doesn't have any predictions for game sales, instead saying that while "the game is very solid and offers a different platforming experience then the existing games on XBLIG...it's still a very chaotic marketplace."

Don't quit your day job

The platform could certainly use some improvements. Things like an enhanced storefront, increased visibility throughout the rest of Xbox Live, more flexible pricing, and maybe even integration with the Kinect API would go a long way towards making XBLIG a place where more than a handful of game developers can make a living.

"The only way it would be more viable is to add achievements and more price points," explained Luke Schneider, the one-man development team behind the excellent radiangames series of XBLIG shooters. "Allowing offline play would be fantastic as well. In other words, make it a more even playing field like Apple's app store. But I don't believe MS will do that due to pressure from publishers. XBLIG is what it is now, and my only hope for something like it succeeding more thoroughly is if Sony or MS pushes an open development channel with the launch of their next console(s), whenever that ends up being."

So, no, chances are you won't be able to quit your day job by releasing a game on XBLIG. And, yes, virtually all of the developers we spoke to are considering moving on from the platform. But all seem to view their experience as valuable, which in the end is part of the point of XBLIG: it's a place where virtually anyone can make a game that can be played on a console. Devs just need to know what they're getting into.

"All developers should be aware of what XBLIG is and is not," said Wishnov. "Don't have unrealistic expectations!"

Listing image by Cthulhu Saves the World image courtesy Zeboyd Games

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